How do you influence someone? It’s usually by knowledge or an action.  Marketers love the fact that if you gather enough numbers on something you come up with a pseudo idea of what someone is like.

The Klout score is becoming a pointless metric in my opinion.  

1. Too many networks to measure

It’s not a case of spreading yourself too thinly, it may be a case of you talk about different things on different networks.  I don’t really mix my tweets from my Facebook, LinkedIn or G+.  The mediums are different and so is the content.  Within my topics, more on that subject in a moment, I tend to communicate with my friends on Facebook and broadcast messages on Twitter.  The range of reach is calculated as an average against all the networks, I’d rather see this separate to each network I’ve attached to the mechanism.

2. Word meanings are different and you have to measure that (somehow).

Klout maintains I’m an “influencer” on coffee…… No I’m not.  I’ve tweeted many times about three different types of coffee.  i) The drink, ii) Coffee Cake (yum) and iii) Open Coffee, the networking event.

This is where Klout’s algorithms need some severe tightening up. I’m assuming there’s some sort of weighted average going on, “Jase has mentioned coffee n times in the last seven days”.  Mentioning the word coffee far from makes you an influencer in the subject. Does my mentioning of Java weight coffee more, programming or both?